In many environments, a single computer user has multiple computing devices he or she uses to perform computing tasks. For example, a corporate employee may have a work computer, a home computer, and a laptop computer. Each of these computer systems may be in and/or may move between different physical locations. However, the employee may desire uniform access to work related applications and work related data from any of his or her computer systems without regard to location. The computer user may also have a computing device with multiple operating systems installed in different partitions. The computer user may desire uniform access to applications running on all of the operating systems without switching interfaces.
Installing the same applications on all of the employee's computing devices can provide a common look and feel across all the computer systems. Installing the same applications on all the employee's computing devices can also provide access to corporate applications and corporate data in a uniform fashion across all of the computing devices. However, installing the same applications on multiple computing devices also has a number of drawbacks such as increased cost and limited central control over non-managed computing devices.
Since users understand and know how to launch resources on their local computers, administrators can ease the burden of accessing remote resources by pushing the resources and settings out to the local computers. However, this is only practical if both the host and local computers are in the same domain (e.g., Active Directory® domain (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.)). Additionally, anything a user has to install locally means that the administrator has lost control of patching the resources or upgrading the application without the help of the user installing an additional package. Therefore, methods and systems that provide seamless and uniform access to non-local resources would have considerable utility.